Went for avoidance on my warrior, with exp and hit cap I got to 40% avoidance, mastery went down to 40% and crit at 11% because I have some fury pieces with crit in my gear. With crit buff and Gaze trinket I should average at over 50% crit in raids, so that should be fun, hopefully I will swim in rage :P

I was wondering if it is still important to have at least one stamina trinket?
After about 750k hp buffed I dont really see the need for more before heroics at least, and when I hit heroics I should have more stamina from higher ilvl gear. Warriors will mitigate and avoid so much of the damage especially with the 2 piece t16, that we are bit like monks, no need for lots of stamina anymore?

I was wondering if it is still important to have at least one stamina trinket?
After about 750k hp buffed I dont really see the need for more before heroics at least, and when I hit heroics I should have more stamina from higher ilvl gear. Warriors will mitigate and avoid so much of the damage especially with the 2 piece t16, that we are bit like monks, no need for lots of stamina anymore?

Where's the problem with that? Just keep one (two) in your bag and if you're to squishy equip it. We really can't tell for sure just due to how different the healing can be, from proactive over absorb to reactive, 10M/25M - there are to many factors involved to give a general statement.

You already stated that your guild will probably take weeks to clear normal so i wouldn't worry to much about anything longterm and just see how the first few weeks went by, we can give better/more precise answers when we've played the encounters on live with our regular team & setups.

Kind of curious as to why in a maximum avoidance dealio AMR arent suggesting to gem dodge rather than parry. Thought it would be quite important to minimize DR given the amount of parry we receive from strength.

Because dodge devalues faster than parry but more or less equal to strength + parry combined.

Also: AMR doesn't think smart, it's just a calculator that uses either the preset dodge & parry values or the numbers you entered yourself. For finetuning you'll still have to use some avoidance-DR spreadsheets.

That will depend totally on raidsize, difficulty, healersetup and the fight in particular.

Ie: if you happen to use barrier a lot it actually improves it's value because the setbonus can crit and mastery won't help against nonblockable bursts. But on any super high physical damage + blockable fight (probably only in 25HC) it's somewhere between 50-75% weaker i guess? In the end you'll just have to try out what works best for you and your team, it's not like most of us will kill the harder heroic bosses in 10 pulls or less so we'll have time in between to swap gems/reforges/trinkets/talents/characters/underwear as it pleases us.

We went for the first four bosses tonight. I was avoidance tanking and took dramatically less damage than our paladin and did much more dps. It looks pretty good. Just make sure to use intervene as much as possible. I am at 24,100 parry/dodge. I was still running Block > Barrier. And my cloak didn't proc all night. I am pretty pleased with the changes.

On a separate note the adds on Sha of Pride weren't silenced after I interrupted them and wouldn't move. But our pali tank could silence and move them with avenger's shield. Did anyone else have trouble moving those adds?

On a separate note the adds on Sha of Pride weren't silenced after I interrupted them and wouldn't move. But our pali tank could silence and move them with avenger's shield. Did anyone else have trouble moving those adds?

They need to actually be silenced, as in Gag Order or Strangulate (avengers shield too).

If you're got a better APL, just post it here and I'll make it the default one.

It’s all about this line:
actions+=/shield_barrier,if=incoming_damage_1500ms>health.max*0.3

With good gear this causes your rage is capped several times and more incoming rage is wasted.
Changing it to “actions+=/shield_barrier,if=incoming_damage_1500ms>health.max*0.2” consumes more rage and gives me better results.

So... is there a consensus now? I tried looking up several sources and a lot of them still seem to favor Mastery. I am raiding 10 man heroic. Even when I looked at top guild prot warriors they do not seem to have a common baseline in gemming. So is it Mastery or Avoidance now?

Originally Posted by magnuzze

considering that TG warriors was here since Vanilla, and DK's got into the World of warcraft in WoTLK... you can say that they have been stealing 2-handed from us.

Originally Posted by Darkfriend

There is a reason you don't just pull numbers out of your ass and throw them on the forums. People will show you wrong. Ass numbers are useless.

Originally Posted by Wrien

I can't believe warriors wine about their defensive capabilities. DK's and warrs are even on heals.

So... is there a consensus now? I tried looking up several sources and a lot of them still seem to favor Mastery. I am raiding 10 man heroic. Even when I looked at top guild prot warriors they do not seem to have a common baseline in gemming. So is it Mastery or Avoidance now?

Mastery:
+ very smooth physical damage intake
+ almost no physical spikes, except for unblockable attacks for which we got Barrier
+ even more Mastery in 5.4; resulting in many crit blocks which in turn give 10 rage
- damage done increases, thank to Riposte, but not as much

Parry/Dodge:
+ overall smooth damage intake
- compared to the mastery build more spikes
+ damage done increases significantly
+ thanks to the highly increased crit chance due to Riposte, more Shield Slams and Devastates will crit = 10 rage each time you crit (not sure about this 3sec internal trigger cooldown someone pointed out in page 1)
+ you can spam Revenge thanks to the cooldown reset each time you dodge or parry an attack!
Revenge generates 20 rage now iirc (sorry, can only play after work :P)
coupled with the Hold the Line glyph, this should also be pretty fun.

Besides that, Dodge and Parry should help pretty well against, for example:
Nazgrim's Sunder, He's Poison attacks.
If the Panda does not hit you, he does not apply poison. Not sure aboit the void zone proccing though.

I'll try Dodge/Parry first. Would be very refreshing if this works out well. It's been so many contents with either full mastery or full stamina.
And I'm really looking forward to the crit the hell out of my opponents as a tank!

Edit: So in the end, I think it's up to your personal preference. One way gemming is boring (like the pallys 320 haste in everything!!!).

We cleared 12/14 on our first raid but we out geared bosses so much that we 1 shot like 10 of the 12. I can't really get a great grasp on how well avoidance will be in 25 man raiding from that first night. It seemed to go well and my damage was through the roof compared to last patch. So far so good.

Funny story, we have so much health because we outgear normals so much that Thok never went into P2 because it requires atleast 10 people to be under 50% health. Well it never happened so it was literally a tank and spank with an AOE hitting for like 30% of our health every like 10 seconds. They also nerfed his damage so tanking was a breeze compared to PTR testing.

Good luck with your progression guys. I'm always open to answering questions provided it isnt something you can find in 2 minutes of searching.